My triumphs and tribulations

More Kids and Lights

Stella

You know, they are still my new toys. So, more kids and lights. Stella was being a really good model, and I managed to get a couple of good snaps of her.

Lucy, colorful

I wanted to try something a bit different (for me) and Lucy let me take a couple of snaps of her. I wanted to try using the colorful background and pushing the exposure on the skin a bit brighter than I normally would. This was shot at f/4.5, 1/250 with two strobes at 1/16th power each.

Table day bed

I did find some time to develop and print a couple of film pics too. This is Tri-X 400 pushed to EI3200. I developed it for about 45 minutes in Rodinal using semi-stand (5 min) agitation. It was very hard for me to print. I tried different grades of filters, but I was either blowing the highlights or just too flat. I finally tried split grade printing. I printed the highlights for 20 sec with a 00 filter, and the blacks for 8 sec or so with a grade 5 filter.

My guess is that I developed the film too long. A couple of the other pictures from the roll were much easier to print using a grade 2 filter for 16 seconds, so maybe not? Not too sure. Maybe this picture was just overexposed?

Thanks. I have been trying to push Tri-X really for no good reason. I’ve done a bunch of development tests to check the density at various times / speeds. They all basically came out a dud. But, when I shoot it and process it, I think it looks ok. Granted, I’m not the most experienced black and white shooter, but all in all not too bad.

I’d like to try something like Delta 3200 and push it in Rodinal, but I think that will have to wait until next month maybe.